Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems Blu Ray vs HD-DVD

Chris,

You're quite ahead of yourself when talking about the potential of 100 and 200GB media, which might well turn out to be incompatible with 1st gen consumer players. It's too early to speculate on these when it's nothing more than a theoretical possibility that very well might require a player upgrade to access.

Also, the problem when you get too large a committee designing something is that the solution is typically riddled with compromises.


For HD-DVD, the goal is to support a simple to implement stereo only player. Mixes can be from 1 to N channels (currently defined as 7.1 maximum) but that can be amended and MLP has plenty of room to grow, with current MLP specifications maxing out at 64 channels @ 24/192K.

All they (HD-DVD working group) have done is define that any player has to support stereo playback via whatever mix is provided.


A few points to make here. First, the 10 Mbits/second limit is strictly a DVD-Video limitation. If memory serves me correctly, the audio channel limitations are somewhere in the vicinity of 20 Mbits/second. I don't have the specs right in front of my nose.

You need to read up on MLP to understand the concept of feed forward and store. MLP is quite capable of feeding forward audio data in advance of its usage so that a momentary shortfall is handled by passing the data ahead of needs and playing back to make up for the short fall.

Others that now far more about MLP than I do have written papers on the topic, or you can read a back issue of WSR where I have written about MLP or check Secrets where Stacey and Don Munsil have written about MLP.


I think the big thing is that Meridian will almost certainly recoup the R&D costs that it has incurred as it carries forward to the next generation formats.

This could lead to further R&D cycles to include more capability.


No. DVD-Audio is specifically tied to the DVD-Video format.

For next generation optical solutions, there won't be a DVD-Audio to speak of.

That said, the last thing I want, is a continuation of what I referred to as "Speaker Babylon" in an article at Secrets.

There are two distinct 2+2+2 configurations, not to mention the Telarc height channel.

Chesky's 2+2+2 is front height, MDG/Tacet are front/side/back L/R channels. Both of these give us all the flaws of traditional 2-channel reproduction with respect to phantom center, comb filtering etc etc etc, only they've created it across more speakers. Perpetuating the same type of mistake across more degrees of freedom is not my idea of progress.

Then there's the Telarc height setup, which utilizes a single height channel, which is shared with the subwoofer channel. Low-pass below 120Hz is the subwoofer output, High-pass above 120 Hz is the height channel which is to be reproduced with a pair of dipolar loudspeakers above the primary listening position.

Arrrrgggh. This is why standardization is important.


Why do you continue to impose DVD-Video limitations on audio tracks that don't exist for HD-DVD? The limit for HD-DVD is currently 7.1, and the potential for even more is a function of specification amendments.


You won't get this for quite a while, as the stuff thats in field is still 24/48K for this type of work. Maybe in 3-4 years, but that's a long shot.

1080p + MC surround for music videos is (IMO) 5-10 years away at the earliest due to the dearth of 1080p gear. Maybe film to 1080p, but I doubt it.

Cheers,